Are foreign buyers driving up Tokyo condo prices?

Get all the data you need about the real estate market in Japan

Are Tokyo condo prices still going up right now?

Yes. Tokyo condo prices are still extremely high, and new-build prices have continued to set records even as the resale market has started to lose some momentum.

The Real Estate Economic Institute put the average new-condo price in Tokyo’s 23 wards at ¥142.49 million in the first half of 2026, up 9.1% from a year earlier. Across Greater Tokyo, the average reached ¥101.35 million, the first time the half-year figure had crossed ¥100 million.

That follows an already exceptional 2025. The average new condo in the 23 wards cost about ¥136 million that year, while the six central wards of Chiyoda, Chuo, Minato, Shinjuku, Bunkyo and Shibuya averaged roughly ¥195 million.

The latest resale numbers are more interesting because they show where the market is changing. Tokyo Kantei’s standardized price for a 70-square-meter used condo in the 23 wards fell 0.8% in June and another 0.1% in July, to ¥127.24 million. June was the first monthly decline in 26 months. Central Tokyo has now declined for three consecutive months.

Tokyo is expensive enough to justify asking who pushed prices this far. But the market is no longer moving upward everywhere at the same speed.

Tokyo condo market	Latest reading	Change	What we can infer
New condos, 23 wards	¥142.49m	+9.1% YoY	New-build prices are still setting records
New condos, Greater Tokyo	¥101.35m	+13.1% YoY	The surge extends beyond central Tokyo
Used condos, 23 wards, 70 m²	¥127.24m	-0.1% MoM in July	Resale prices have started flattening
Central Tokyo resale	Three monthly declines	Latest trend	The expensive core is cooling first

How many Tokyo condos are foreign buyers actually buying?

Far fewer than the public debate often suggests. Buyers registered overseas accounted for 3.5% of new-condo acquisitions across Tokyo’s 23 wards in the latest comprehensive government study.

Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism reached that figure by examining property-registration records covering roughly 550,000 newly built condominiums. The overseas share in the 23 wards had risen sharply from 1.6% in 2024, so international demand was clearly becoming more important.

Still, a 3.5% share means roughly 96.5% of recorded purchases involved buyers with Japanese addresses.

There is one important limitation. Japan’s registry did not identify nationality when these transactions were recorded. A Taiwanese investor living in Tokyo would appear as a Japan-based buyer, while a Japanese citizen living abroad could appear in the overseas category. The government is now moving toward much better nationality tracking precisely because the old data could not answer this question cleanly.

We therefore should not read 3.5% as the exact foreign-national share. We can use it to establish the scale of direct overseas demand, and that scale remains much smaller than the impression created by headlines about foreign buyers taking over Tokyo.

Area	Overseas-address share	Previous year	Earlier peak, 2018-23
Tokyo prefecture	3.0%	1.5%	1.8%
Tokyo 23 wards	3.5%	1.6%	2.0%
Central six wards	7.5%	3.2%	5.3%
Rest of the market	Large majority	—	—

Are foreign buyers big enough to move central Tokyo condo prices?

Yes. Foreign buyers can move prices in central Tokyo even though they are nowhere close to controlling the whole Tokyo condo market.

The foreign-buyer argument becomes much stronger when we zoom into the six central wards. Overseas-address purchasers represented 7.5% of new-condo acquisitions there, according to the land ministry, more than double the 3.2% recorded the previous year.

Some wards went much higher. Shinjuku reached 14.6%. Shibuya and Chiyoda were both around 8%. Those are large enough shares to affect competition for particular luxury towers, especially when only a small number of comparable units come onto the market.

Prices are set by the buyers who actually compete for the available units. If ten or fifteen buyers in every hundred in a scarce development can pay above the previous local benchmark, developers get room to test higher launch prices. Recent transactions then become comparables for the next project.

That gives foreign capital real influence at the top of the market.

The mistake is stretching that observation across all 23 wards. Overseas demand is highly concentrated, while Tokyo’s price increases have been much broader. Foreign buyers are better understood as an extra source of bidding power in prime Tokyo, where they can sometimes have a substantial effect.

Why does the foreign-buyer share look huge in some Tokyo wards and tiny in others?

Because foreign demand is heavily concentrated in particular buildings, and a few big launches can completely change a ward’s numbers.

Shinjuku’s overseas-address share jumped from 1.7% in 2024 to 14.6% in the first half of 2025. Minato moved the other way, falling from 9.7% to 4.3%. Chuo went from 2.2% to zero in the same government dataset. Toshima dropped from 4.7% to 0.5%.

It would be hard to reconcile those swings with a smooth foreign takeover of Tokyo housing.

The land ministry itself warned that the percentages can change dramatically depending on what projects happen to be supplied in a given period. Foreign buyers tend to cluster around newer towers, internationally recognizable neighborhoods and projects actively marketed to wealthy investors. If one large development completes, a ward’s foreign share can jump. When that project disappears from the next sample, the percentage can collapse.

This concentration strengthens one part of the foreign-buyer argument: a buyer group does not need a huge Tokyo-wide share to affect a specific tower.

At the same time, it weakens the claim that foreign demand explains citywide inflation. The geographic pattern is simply too uneven.

Ward	Overseas-address share	Previous year	What stands out
Shinjuku	14.6%	1.7%	Huge project-driven jump
Shibuya	8.1%	8.6%	Consistently high
Chiyoda	7.7%	6.2%	Significant international demand
Minato	4.3%	9.7%	Sharp decline
Chuo	0.0%	2.2%	Shows how volatile the data can be
Toshima	0.5%	4.7%	Another large reversal

Is the weak yen pulling foreign buyers into Tokyo?

Yes. The weak yen has made expensive Tokyo condos considerably easier to swallow for buyers earning or holding wealth in stronger currencies.

The scale is easy to see. The yen averaged roughly ¥110 to the US dollar in 2021 before weakening toward the ¥140-¥150 range for long stretches later on.

Imagine the same ¥150 million Tokyo condo at two exchange rates. At ¥110 per dollar, it costs about $1.36 million. At ¥150, it costs roughly $1 million.

Tokyo property prices rose during that period, so overseas buyers did not receive a clean 27% discount on actual apartments. Yet the currency absorbed a surprisingly large part of the yen-price increase from the perspective of a dollar-based investor.

That creates a strange market. A Japanese household can look at a ¥150 million condo and see a home becoming dramatically less affordable relative to local income. A buyer arriving with dollars, Singapore dollars or another strong currency can see a prime asset whose foreign-currency price has risen much less dramatically.

This helps explain why overseas demand has grown recently. It also explains why that demand is especially visible in expensive central properties, where currency savings can be worth tens of millions of yen.

¥150m Tokyo condo	Exchange rate	Approx. USD cost	Difference vs ¥110/$
Stronger yen	¥110/$	$1.36m	—
¥130/$	¥130/$	$1.15m	-15%
¥140/$	¥140/$	$1.07m	-21%
Weaker yen	¥150/$	$1.00m	-27%

Are foreign buyers really the speculators flipping Tokyo condos?

Some are, but the data do not support the idea that overseas speculators are behind most of Tokyo’s condo inflation.

Japan’s land ministry found that short-term resales have become more common in central Tokyo. About 12.2% of newly built condos in the six central wards were resold within one year in its latest analysis. Large developments were particularly exposed: across the 23 wards, the short-resale share reached 9.9% for large condominium projects compared with 3.3% for other projects in the first half of 2024.

Overseas-address buyers also became more active in short-term resale.

Yet the same government investigation found no particular pattern of overseas buyers aggressively acquiring and quickly reselling properties worth ¥200 million or more in the central six wards. That cuts against the strongest version of the speculation story, which assumes foreign investors are repeatedly flipping exactly those trophy apartments.

Mitsubishi UFJ Trust reached a similar conclusion after examining both short resales and condos entering the rental market. Its research found no sustained rise in non-end-user purchases large enough to explain the entire condominium market.

Developers are nevertheless taking the problem seriously. Several major groups have introduced purchase limits, stricter name controls and bans on marketing units for resale before handover. Some Tokyo redevelopment projects are also moving toward much longer resale restrictions.

There is speculative heat in parts of central Tokyo. The evidence gets much weaker when that behavior is presented as the engine behind the whole city’s price boom.

What is pushing Tokyo condo prices up more than foreign buyers?

The strongest explanation is a brutal combination of scarce new supply, expensive land and rising construction costs.

Greater Tokyo produced only 21,962 new condos in 2025, according to the Real Estate Economic Institute. That was the lowest annual supply since its records began in 1973. Developers were selling into a market with historically little new stock.

The squeeze has continued. Only 7,989 new units were supplied across Greater Tokyo in the first half of 2026, down another 0.8% year on year, while the average price climbed above ¥100 million.

Land has become much more expensive at the same time. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s latest official assessment showed residential land values rising 9.0% across the 23 wards, faster than the previous year’s 7.9%. Every ward increased for a fifth consecutive year. Minato rose 16.6%, Taito 14.2% and Shinagawa 13.9%.

Even the slowest wards were nowhere close to flat. Katsushika rose 5.6%, Edogawa 5.7% and Nerima 6.2%.

That breadth is hard to explain with foreign luxury-condo demand. Overseas buyers cluster in certain locations. Rising land and replacement costs hit projects across Tokyo.

High labor and material costs then make new development even harder. Developers faced with expensive sites and expensive construction increasingly concentrate on projects where buyers can absorb premium pricing. That pushes the new-build market further toward wealthy households and investors.

Foreign buyers enter this already tight market with additional purchasing power. They can push the expensive end further, but most of the underlying pressure exists before they arrive.

Is Tokyo simply building too few condos?

Yes. Tokyo’s new-condo shortage has become so severe that it changes how we should interpret almost every demand story in the market.

The 21,962 Greater Tokyo condos released in 2025 represented the lowest annual supply in more than half a century of Real Estate Economic Institute data. Only 8,064 were in Tokyo’s 23 wards.

Meanwhile, 5,669 Greater Tokyo units were priced above ¥100 million. That means roughly one quarter of all new supply had already moved into nine-digit-yen territory.

Looking only at who is buying can be misleading. Buyers are competing over a shrinking flow of new units, and developers increasingly need high selling prices to make projects work.

The supply shortage also changes the effect of wealthy buyers. An extra thousand high-budget purchasers have much more pricing power when developers are releasing about 22,000 units than they would in a market producing 50,000 or 60,000.

So overseas demand can punch above its numerical weight today. Scarcity is what gives that demand so much leverage.

Why are used Tokyo condos rising outside foreign-buyer hotspots?

Because the Tokyo condo boom has spread through normal buyer substitution as new homes became too expensive.

Tokyo Kantei’s resale data have shown strong increases far beyond Minato, Shibuya and the best-known international investment districts. Apartments along western rail corridors and areas such as Nakano and Koenji also repriced sharply during the run-up.

That is what we would expect when new construction becomes prohibitively expensive. Buyers who cannot justify a new tower start considering five-year-old units. Buyers priced out of those properties move toward older condos. Others move several stations farther from the center.

Each step transfers price pressure into another part of the market.

Foreign residents and overseas investors certainly participate in Tokyo’s resale market, and Japan still lacks a perfect nationality breakdown for those transactions. But we currently have no evidence showing foreign ownership anywhere near dominant levels across all of the neighborhoods experiencing large increases.

The geographic spread of resale inflation therefore points toward a broader housing shortage and substitution effect.

As seen above, direct overseas purchases are concentrated much more heavily in prime projects. The resale boom travelled considerably farther.

Are Tokyo condo prices finally getting too expensive for local buyers?

Yes. Domestic affordability is now one of the clearest limits on how much further Tokyo condo prices can run.

The gap between condo prices and rents shows how far valuations have stretched. Tokyo Kantei reported that rents for condominium units in the 23 wards reached ¥5,157 per square meter in July, another record for the recent period. Rents are genuinely rising.

Purchase prices have gone much faster.

A separate Tokyo Kantei analysis of new condominiums put Greater Tokyo’s price-to-rent multiple above 30 years. In simple terms, the purchase price of the average unit was worth more than three decades of comparable annual rent before expenses.

Financing has also become less forgiving. Mortgage borrowers spent years operating in an almost zero-rate environment, while Bank of Japan normalization is now feeding gradually into borrowing costs.

We can already see resistance in actual sales conditions. The initial-month contract rate for new Greater Tokyo condos was only 63.9% in 2025, down from 66.9% and below the 70% level for a second consecutive year. Record prices were accompanied by a fairly ordinary sales rate rather than buyers fighting over every available unit.

That is a warning for developers. Wealthy domestic and international purchasers can support premium projects, but Tokyo still needs ordinary Japan-based buyers to clear a large part of the market.

Is the Tokyo condo market starting to cool now?

Yes, especially in the resale market, and the change is clearest around central Tokyo.

Tokyo Kantei’s latest figures show the standardized 70-square-meter price in the 23 wards falling for two consecutive months. Central Tokyo has declined for three. The number of properties coming onto the market has also increased.

Seller behavior is changing as well. In June, more than half of central-Tokyo resale listings tracked by Tokyo Kantei had undergone price revisions. A growing number of owners were discovering that their original asking price was too ambitious.

Across Greater Tokyo, REINS data showed 47,151 unsold resale listings in July, 5.5% more than a year earlier, while the number of completed resale transactions that month fell 8.6%.

None of those figures points to a crash. New-build prices are currently making record highs, rents are still increasing and Tokyo land values remain strong.

But buyers have become more selective.

That is particularly useful for judging the influence of overseas capital. Central Tokyo has some of the highest foreign participation in Japan. Yet increased listings and repeated price cuts are appearing there anyway. Foreign money clearly has limits.

Would Tokyo condo prices fall if foreign buyers disappeared?

Central Tokyo would probably become cheaper at the margin, but removing foreign buyers would leave most of the forces that made Tokyo expensive in place.

The effect would be strongest in luxury new developments. Removing buyers responsible for 7.5% of acquisitions across the six central wards, and much more in some individual projects, would reduce competition. Developers might need to slow releases, offer more attractive terms or accept lower clearing prices on certain units.

The rest of Tokyo would feel much less dramatic.

Land would still be expensive. Construction companies would still face high labor and material costs. New-condo supply would still be close to historic lows. Domestic high-income households and companies would still buy property. Buyers priced out of new construction would still compete for used apartments.

Current government policy also gives us an interesting real-world test. Japan has tightened reporting for non-resident property acquisitions, is moving toward recording nationality more systematically and is actively debating stronger land-purchase rules. Developers have simultaneously introduced measures aimed at speculative resales.

If foreign speculation were the dominant force holding Tokyo prices up, those changes should eventually produce a very large repricing in the most exposed areas. For now, the early cooling is much more modest.

Foreign demand is influential enough that removing it would matter. It does not look large enough to unwind Tokyo’s underlying housing economics.

Are foreign buyers driving up Tokyo condo prices?

Partly. Foreign buyers are clearly helping push up prices in central Tokyo, but blaming them for the broader Tokyo condo boom gives them far too much credit.

The evidence is strongest in prime Tokyo. Overseas-address buyers reached 7.5% of new-condo acquisitions across the six central wards, with Shinjuku at 14.6% and Shibuya and Chiyoda around 8%. In a scarce luxury development, those percentages are easily high enough to raise competitive bids and give developers confidence to test higher prices.

Across the 23 wards, though, the overseas share was only 3.5%. At the same time, residential land prices increased in every ward, new Greater Tokyo condo supply fell to its lowest level since 1973, construction remained expensive and price growth spread into resale neighborhoods with much less obvious international demand.

Those patterns tell us where the larger force sits.

Tokyo has spent years making fewer new condos while the cost of producing each one has climbed. The city then added wealthy foreign demand, helped by a weak yen and Tokyo’s relatively open property-ownership rules. That extra demand has had its biggest effect exactly where we would expect: expensive central buildings with limited supply.

Lately, we have gained one more useful piece of evidence. Central resale prices have started falling despite foreign participation remaining an important part of the market. More apartments are being listed, sellers are cutting asking prices and transaction growth has weakened. Overseas capital can add heat, but it cannot make buyers accept any price indefinitely.

Our conclusion is quite sharp: foreign buyers are pushing central Tokyo condos higher at the margin, and in a few projects their influence may be substantial. They are not the main reason Tokyo condos became so expensive. Scarce supply, soaring land values and high replacement costs did most of that work. Foreign money made an already expensive market hotter.

Who is the author of this content?

BAMBOOROUTES

A team specialized in real estate investing in APAC countries (Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, etc.).

We are a team of financial experts, legal professionals, developers, and local real estate specialists dedicated to helping people like you avoid mistakes when investing in real estate in a foreign place, particularly in Japan. If you’d like to learn more about us, you can check our presentation page.